The Union

Here is another made-for-streaming film that you will forget about almost before you’ve even finished watching. It’s just aggressively fine: not terrible, per se, but also not what you could comfortably label good. If The Union feels formulaic and familiar, that may be because Netflix has in fact made this kind of film — a globe-trotting spy action-comedy about an extrajudicial crime-fighting force — a number of times before: 6 Underground and last year’s Heart Of Stone follow similar templates, to name but two.

It begins in an extremely Mission: Impossible mould: like the original 1996 film of that series, we begin in a European city where a daring espionage mission goes horribly wrong and the good guys get picked off like flies. Led by Halle Berry’s Roxanne and J.K. Simmons’ Tom, these good guys are members of the Union, a secret agency (“Half the intelligence community don’t know we exist,” claims Roxanne) whose exact mission and purpose is fuzzy. For a secret agency, they sure do shoot a lot of guns, loudly. But this is not a film to get bogged down in details.

It feels rather designed to be watched in the background.

Then we switch to New Jersey. We know this, because there’s copious amounts of Bruce Springsteen on the soundtrack and Lorraine Bracco has just appeared. It’s here we meet Mark Wahlberg’s Mikey, a salt-of-the-earth construction worker who enjoys a few cold ones with his buddies and recreating the ‘Lunch Atop A Skyscraper’ photo in his spare time.

He is also, it turns out, Roxanne’s old high-school sweetheart, which is rather handy. Because this film happens to follow what is known as Armageddon Logic: rather than get an expert to do your incredibly important high-risk job, why not hire an unqualified schlub from the University Of Life? It’s never satisfactorily explained why Mikey would be recruited for the Union. The explanation given — that they “need a nobody” so the bad guys can’t track him — stops making sense almost immediately. But, y’know, details.

So Mikey heads to London, and his mission — to track down some sort of intelligence MacGuffin, it’s not really important — begins. Filmed on location in the UK capital but somehow looking like it was shot in a green-screen studio, our secret agents decide to keep a low profile by hanging out in the city’s biggest tourist spots (Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge, the Royal Albert Hall). There are some unintentionally amusing moments for British viewers, including a deliciously American pronunciation of “Southwark”, and another cheering Fiona Bruce cameo (with this and David Fincher’s The Killer, the BBC newsreader is becoming an unexpectedly prolific action-movie star).

And so it goes, through the motions, following more-or-less exactly the perilous action-comedy path you might expect. As with most of these sorts of films it feels rather designed to be watched in the background, with little consideration for those who would want to watch something in the foreground. There does, admittedly, seem to be a good level of practical stunts here; and there is a decent enough chemistry between Berry and Wahlberg, who are pretty seasoned at this sort of thing by now. It’s refreshing, too, to reflect that two people in their fifties can lead an action film so capably. It’s just a shame that the end result is merely, at best, fine.